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vamphorica · 27 days

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♰ Religion in Death Note ♰

One of the most fascinating things about Death Note as a franchise is its exploration of faith and religion in the context of the world building, and how it compliments this using Christian motifs and imagery. The latter is often portrayed superficially, which I think is a shame given that there are many occasions throughout the series where relationships that some characters have with faith could be examined in accordance with the world Ohba has created.

For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to consider two main religious influences in the world of Death Note:

The Canon Explanation (The Shinigami Realm, Rules of the Death Note, Mu as the Afterlife, etc.)

Christianity (specifically, the use of Catholic imagery in Ohba’s official art.)

Let's begin with Canon.

i. The Canon Explanation

Ohba is clearly partial to weaving a complex web of rules as a means to support the supernatural premises of his stories (see Platinum End). This makes The Canon Explanation so effective not only because it limits the behaviour of the characters throughout the text, but it is also very pertinent to religion conceptually. By listing out the apparent commandments of the Death Note, a set of religious principles have been established that the users of the Death Note must follow. While you are not technically committing a sin by, let's say, trying to kill someone over the age of 124 with the Death Note (x), it sets out a guide which is indicative of rules one might follow in a religious text. You could say that Light, Misa, Mikami, and Takada each had to have a level of faith in the Death Note in order to use it. They all followed the rules, even if they did so under Light's direction as their self-proclaimed God. Light’s familiarity with these rules and his confidence with manipulating them is what ultimately makes his reign as Kira so effective. I think the act of writing a name down in the notebook itself is a form of commitment to belief – as a concept, the Death Note seems too absurd to a sceptic.

When the Shinigami begin arriving in the human world, it is obvious that they are not divine beings in the perfect, omnipotent manner that humans may expect. If anything, they are curiously quite human themselves – forgetting rules and acting as a result of emotional impulses. It is indeed Ryuk's boredom that sets the story into motion – everyone who died as a result of the Death Note did so because of him. The Shinigami pose no actual threat to the humans they follow, often noting how humans appear more competent at being Death Gods than they themselves are. While this is subjective, depending on interpretations of faith, the typical Grim Reaper figure is seen as a serious, all-knowing figure that is to be feared, while the Shinigami of Death Note are far less intimidating. I think this delivers a decent proposal that religion in Canon is not a matter of worshipping the supernatural, or suggesting that they are better than us. By having the Shinigami presented as being similar to ourselves, human characters have the ability to use their power without the fear of divine retribution. Light’s extensive knowledge of the Death Note rules and how to work around them, along with his strict work ethic, only further demonstrates his commitment to carving out his position as God when compared to the Shinigami.

Mu is explained quite simply – there is no heaven or hell. There is a notable lack of elaboration here for a reason, but I do wonder if Light might have been more reluctant in his pursuits had traditional heaven and hell been at stake. Would he have become Kira if his act of justice would damn him to hell? Would he be concerned that his victims might end up going to heaven? Mu is the Canon version for what happens when one dies in this universe, so, beyond proposing speculative questions, there is little to analyse here.

Now, there is one character who I want to delve deeper in relation to The Canon Explanation: Mikami.

Mikami -> Mikami is deeply devout. Of all the named characters in the series, Mikami is the only one who is expressly religious, particularly regarding the Canon Explanation. While I think it is interesting to consider Light Yagami's relationship to Godhood, it is only through Mikami that we understand Kira’s societal impact. Mikami is also the only character in Death Note to be granted a rather comprehensive backstory, so we are given an insight into what led him to become such an ardent Kira supporter. Light chose Mikami not just for these strongly held opinions but also because of his devotion to him specifically. Mikami is ritualistic in the way he worships the idea of Kira through his dedication to writing one page of names in the Death Note daily, following Light’s commands without question. The only other occasion where we see a similar act of religiosity towards Kira is at the very end of the manga when a group of Kira supporters take a pilgrimage to pay their respects. Yet even this does not quite encapsulate Mikami's religious fanaticism. His strong conviction that Kira is God demonstrates the societal inclination to view Kira as a religious figure to be worshipped.

I think because Death Note relies so strongly on Light's internal psychology as he encounters various forms of opposition, the external impact of Kira on the world is only provided to us through passing mentions of political support. It is absolutely crucial to interpret Kira in a political context, but again, this is not really explored in too much detail. What we do know is that Kira supporters, including Misa, Mikami and Takada, may politically be in favour of Light's moral judgement, but because he poses himself as a God rather than a political leader, we must assume that he wants to play into a deific persona because it affords him far more unconditional power than he would have as a mere mortal.

From the beginning, Light is able to present his power as originating from a divine source, and it is only until Lind L. Tailor’s death that it becomes apparent what limitations Light is working within. Before then, criminals dying of heart attacks across the world could not be considered to be within human capability, let alone performed by a singular perpetrator, so Light maintained the illusion of omnipotence. Distancing himself from his humanity not only gave Light the benefit of being undetectable for some time, but also encouraged people to support Kira through the belief that he was inherently above them. It was only L who managed to shatter this façade early on in the Kira investigation.

I will now move onto something slightly more tangible, as it reflects our world within the text – Death Note's use of Catholic imagery.

ii. Christianity

As if to make up for the lack of exploration into Kira's religious influence, Death Note heavily relies upon Christian imagery to highlight its desire for religion to be seen as a core component of the franchise. Realistically, I am aware that a lot of manga and Japanese culture from the 2000s was heavily inspired by Catholic imagery and that there was certainly an aesthetic trend being taken advantage of here. However, I am still going to consider it specifically in relation to Death Note. It gives me an excuse to move on from Ohba to Obata anyhow, which I am more than willing to do.

Let's have a look at some official art.

There's a lot to be discussed about these specific pieces of art, and there are plenty more examples that I am sure can be found and analysed over, but we can recognise what their general theme is – kitschy Catholicism. This is not intended as criticism, I love Obata's art and as unsubtle as these official pieces may be, they reinforce Death Note's desire to incorporate religion into its series as a strong motif, if not an effectively developed theme. It also somewhat exposes its superficiality. The imagery is explicit, bold and bright, without doing much work in considering what the actual religious belief might be able to bring to the series beyond the visual components (according to this post -> x the Latin on the last image isn't rendered properly, which proves my point further). There are instances in the anime where there are Biblical references, such as frames that foreshadow L’s death, but the manga does not engage in these same parallels.

This leads me nicely onto talking about Misa.

Misa -> Misa is shown throughout the series to lean heavily into fashion and interior design that reflects a very Gothic Christian aesthetic, which is undeniably iconic and an important visual aspect to her character. Mirroring the series more generally, it does appear that this is the extent to her relationship with the Christian faith. Misa’s allegiance to Kira could suggest that the trauma of her parents’ death came to some kind of resolution when their murderer was himself killed. Again, we have no idea if she actually was a religious character to begin with and I need to stress, it does not matter, but it is still worth considering given how a lot of the Christian imagery in the series is associated with her character specifically. I don't think this feeds into any flat character analysis that might suggest she doesn't know the potential significance of the crosses she wears or decorates her home with. We could just say she has an aesthetic that is very well composed but doesn't carry much weight beyond its stylistic merit.

Derailing slightly, but I do wish they had maintained this style throughout the entire series. Alas, as soon as she met Light, she lost this cool Goth look pretty quickly. Rem would never have let this happen. 💔

One more character analysis before we wrap this up. The quite honest reason as to why I decided to write up this essay was so that I could discuss Mello in relation to religion in Death Note.

Mello → Much of what I discussed about Misa's style could be applied to Mello, the only other character who visually demonstrates any religious tendency. However, I think there are some differences here that could suggest Mello is actually religious, which then allows us to consider his character in the context of the Canon Explanation. Firstly, one of the main signifiers Mello wears is his rosary, and while it is unlikely you will experience any adverse effects from wearing one as a non believer, I think those who wear a rosary are aware of the deeper connection to Catholicism than someone who wears a simple cross necklace (see Misa above, right). Secondly, narratively, I think there is more opportunity for Mello to be religious. Wammy's House, from their gates, actually appears to be a Christian organisation, and while I do not actually believe that they were, I find it interesting nonetheless. I also would be surprised if they were denominationally Catholic, if we are following this line of logic, presumably they would be CofE, but who knows. Regardless, even if Mello was not religious as a child, I think his arrival into the Mafia would certainly have introduced him to Catholicism. Of course it seems antithetical, but I would not be all that surprised if a teenage boy who is expected to do some horrendous things to rise to the top of a criminal organisation might turn to God in the process.

Following on from the prior point, Mello is a completely contradictory character, so I do not think it is all that necessary to consider his moral code from an entirely rational perspective. I think the fact his Beretta has a small cross charm on it in itself is very symbolic of the kind of character we are dealing with here (see below). Interestingly, it looks to be a Celtic cross, rather than a traditional crucifix.

What does this actually mean? Mello represents a good integration of the two religious influences I've discussed – he appears to have faith in a religion that we as readers contextually understand, and yet he interacts easily with Shinigami and the Death Note. While the two do not contradict one another exactly, I think The Canon Explanation certainly does not lend much credence to Catholic interpretations within the text. Like the others who have encountered a Death Note, Mello is initially shocked by the arrival of the Shinigami attached to his notebook, but quickly recovers. He interrogates Sidoh with such evident effectiveness that he ends up frightening him.

I think this is where I begin to get a little frustrated with the depiction of religion in Death Note because we have such a fascinating premise here. Does Mello's faith waver as his beliefs are evidently challenged by Sidoh? Does he consider Kira as a force of evil from a moral perspective informed by Wammy's, or his understanding of God? Does he believe in heaven and hell? None of these questions are answered, and I do appreciate I am being fussy because I am very fond of Mello, but I think there was a rather unique opportunity present in the series that was completely neglected. I have already explained how Death Note relies so heavily on Catholic imagery and clearly wishes to present itself as a series that deals with religious themes, so I think there is a failure here to consider the nuances that have already been set up.

How interesting do you suppose it would be to see how Kira's influence begins to impact the other established religions, as people see criminals dying en masse? Remember that ordinary people would be likely predisposed to consider this as an act of God. Society would certainly be more scared, especially as it would simply be inevitable that Kira killed innocent people who had been deemed criminals by their legal systems. There is a lot to go analyse about that topic alone, but another time!

I suppose with a lot of the questions I have posed, they could be answered through fanfiction or headcanons. I could decide that Misa believed in God until she met Light, or that Mello chose to ignore the implications of Mu given that he follows a religion that sets itself up on the premise of eternal reward or damnation. I just want to facilitate further conversation, because I do think this topic is fascinating.

Thank you @saturniiids, @vengeflies and @stylooooo for giving this a read for me! ♡

#religion #christianity #catholic #mello #mihael keehl #light yagami #teru mikami #misa amane #death note #tsugumi ohba #takeshi obata #analysis #my essay #textpost

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cannedwyrms · 2 months

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Spoilers for Shadow of the Erdtree but...

I'm gonna talk a bit about Miquella.

So, I've seen a lot of (what I believe to be) misconceptions about what we learn about his character in SOTE. I'd like to clear them up as best I can, although I'm no expert at the lore. Still, I think a lot of people are quick to discard him as an irredeemable villain too quickly, or believe that his character in the dlc is different from how he was presented in the base game.

Now, in the base game, I too thought Miquella was pretty cool. He had the rare honor of being one of like 3 characters to not be racist, he seemed to actually care for his sister and have a good relationship with his brother, and he just seemed like the only demigod with some kind of basic empathy.

However, while I believe all of those things are true, there were signs that there was something deeper going on.

Take the bewitching branch, for example.

It's description goes like this:

"The Empyrean Miquella is loved by many people. Indeed, he has learned very well how to compel such affection."

So, basically, we already knew he could charm people.

Here, I think, is the first misconception. Miquella does not brainwash or mind control people, he just has the ability to make people like him. "He wields love to shrive clean the hearts of men," as the honorable sir Ansbach says.

Shrive, by the way, means to confess, or in this case I think absolve.

So, while Mogh is absolutely the victim, it should be noted that he didn't abandon his original goal. He just factored Miquella into it. His plan went from "rule my dynasty" to "rule my dynasty with Miquella." Still bad, I want to stress, but I think people believe that Miquella can just turn people into mindless slaves or something. All he can do is make you love him and see his point of view.

Next, let's talk about him and Malenia. In the base game, he seemed to really care for her, going as far as leaving the Golden Order when he learned it wouldn't help her.

Now, though, people believe he actually never cared about her at all and even that she was brainwashed into following him.

For this, I'll actually quote Miquella's dialogue in the Consort Radahn fight. (We'll get to him, don't worry)

"My loyal blade, and champion of the festival. Both your deeds will ever be praised in song."

So, when he says "my loyal blade," he's talking about Malenia, right? You know, Malenia, the blade of Miquella.

It's obvious to me that Miquella did care about his sister. His actions in the base game reflect this, and he's the same guy in the dlc, so of course he'd still care about her.

I suppose he could also be talking about Leda here, but what I got from her arc is that she was always doomed by her own bloodlust to be a failure to her cause. In the end, she never truly understood Miquella, and he probably never even knew she existed.

But I'll save all that for another post.

Point is, Miquella definitely cared a lot about his sister, so much so in fact that, in the moment he was so close to achieving his goals, he praised her accomplishments.

But, there's more to his dialogue, which I will use to clear up yet another misconception.

Miquella also praised the tarnished here. "Champion of the Festival," and all that.

This is because Miquella doesn't hate anyone. He doesn't want to fight us. Consider his instant lose move, where he charms you. To me, this reads as Miquella looking for a peaceful outcome to your conflict. What does he say to you?

"I promise you a thousand year voyage guided by compassion."

And

"Lord of the Old Order, let us go together."

It's clear to me that he's trying for a peaceful solution.

See, I think a lot of people have begun to believe that Miquella is some kind of compassionless robot, but, as always with elden ring characters, it's more complex than that.

Miquella obviously has a lot of empathy for the world. Maybe even too much. Instead of him wanting to rule over everything as some kind of God, he simply wants to make the world a kinder place.

Like Marika, he sought godhood not for personal power, but for a cause. But, as we all know by now, to become a god in Elden Ring is to abandon your humanity.

Miquella literally does this, while I think for Marika it's a bit more metaphorical.

Elden Ring is about how people lose themselves in pursuit of their goals, and this is especially true in SOTE.

So, with that framework, Miquella is actually the obvious choice for the main antagonist of the dlc.

Think about it.

What better antagonist could there be for a game about purpose and cause being twisted than a highly compassionate person who became a monster? It's almost painfully on the nose. (In a good way)

Miquella might even be aware that he's done awful things, but as long as it's in service of a better future, he probably sees it as a necessary evil. Still evil, mind you, but necessary.

Normally, I'd just say that if he worked on making everyone be less being racist and mean, then no one would need necessary evil, but Elden Ring avoids this because, at the time out tarnished arrives back at the lands between, racism is literally a law of reality.

It seems like the only way to change that would be for a new god to write new rules.

I don't know, that's all mostly speculation on my part, but whatever. My point is, Miquella absolutely makes sense as the main antagonist of the dlc, but he is notably not the main antagonist of the base game, nor the story at large.

Personally, I'd argue those titles fall to Morgott and Marika respectively, but I digress.

Miquella is just one link in a long chain of people fighting for a cause they believe in. Really, his actions are no worse than Ranni's, but strangely no one is really as upset about the fact that she literally had Godwin murdered to attain her goals as they are with Miquella doing the same thing to Mogh.

Something interesting that I noticed is that Miquella is actually very similar to Messmer. Whether that was intentional or not is not for me to say, but I do think it's interesting that the oldest demigod and the youngest have a lot in common.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm no Messmer lore expert , but, for example, Messmer is often described as being very compassionate and nice, only taking on the burden of being the face of the hornsent genocide to spare his mother that shame. It's an interesting contradiction, to be sure, and one that is quite similar to how Miquella sheds his humanity to make a brighter future.

Perhaps Messmer is meant, in part, to mirror Miquella to make his seemingly "villainous" turn make more sense.

Again, maybe that's just speculation on my part, but what's important is that Elden Ring stresses again and again that there is no such thing as pure evil. Everyone's a victim in some way.

All that to say, I don't think Miquella is out of character in the dlc. I think everything we learn about him is perfectly in line with his portrayal in the base game.

Alright, it's finally time to talk about the big guy with a little horse.

So, I've seen a lot of people say that Radahn was charmed and used by Miquella, or that Miquella only saw him as a tool, but I really don't think that's true.

Let's take a look at some more of Miquella's dialogue.

"Aspiring Lord of the Old Order. If you have known sin, if you grieve for this world, then yeild the path forward to us. To I, Miquella, and my Promised Consort, Radahn."

Now, I don't know about you, but of Miquella only saw Radahn as a tool, then what's with all the "Yeild the path forward to us," and "To I, Miquella, and my Promised Consort, Radahn."

If he really viewed Radahn as just a means to an end, then why specify the both of them, unless Radahn was always in on Miq's plot?

Also, if Miquella really only wanted a big guy to ride around on and fight for him, why go through all the trouble of making Radahn a promise? Why not just bewitch him from the start and just force him to follow you?

I don't know why Radahn and Malenia fought. Maybe that was part of the vow, if Miquella could grant Radahn a warrior's death, then he'd follow him, or something like that. So maybe my theory isn't totally sound, but I do still think it's just as plausible as the bewitched theory, if not more.

Another thing I've heard people say as evidence of the bewitched theory is that Radahn wouldn't have gone along with it because Leonard wouldn't be with him.

But, like, you guys, that horse is dead. You killed it in your fight with Radahn in the base game. And Radahn is obsessed with warrior's deaths and all that. He probably saw that Leonard was dead, mourned him silently, and even resolved to take take revenge on the one who killed him, which, again, is you.

And, as a side note, Starscourge Radahn did not treat Leonard with any amount of respect. Did we even see the same attack animations. He was pushing him into the ground, standing on him, and definitely not feeding him. Leonard was described as scrawny, but when we see him, he's downright skeletal. And of course Radahn wasn't taking care of him. He was a literal zombie.

So, I don't think Radahn was bewitched. I think he willingly went with Miquella, once his soul was put into Mogh's body.

Miquella, at his core, is compassion without understanding. He feels for the plight of the world and its inhabitants without having the context necessary to understand why they are suffering. It's a very childish outlook, reflected in his design and curse, his outward childlike form representing his nieve understanding of the world.

That's why he can only see godhood as the solution to the suffering. Because it's all he knows. He was an empearyan, after all.

Of course, if he was a little more emotionally intelligent, he'd realize that abandoning everything that made him who he was is a bad thing, but he's not. He can't see past his own status, not in an arrogant way, it's more like he just doesn't know or understand there's an alternative.

He's that theme I mentioned earlier, the pursuit of goals turning you into a monster, personified. I mean he literally leaves his humanity behind. Can't get much more obvious than that.

Well, that's everything I have on Miquella, at least for now. I've just seen so many "Miquella is actually super evil" type posts and videos, and just a general increase in Miquella hate, which maybe is to be expected, but I still think a lot of people missed the point.

If course, everything I've said is subjective, and if Miquella being evil is what makes you like the character, then more power to you.

But if you, like, actively hate Miquella or misunderstand what we're presented in game, then I don't know. I can't stop you, I guess, but maybe I've managed to change your mind. I think the fun of lore hunting in this game is that everyone kinda has their own version of events, it's almost like we're historians debating ancient history. Idk, I just find that cool, so if your interpretation differs from mine, I think that's fine. Just don't be an ass about it, basically.

Tl;dr: if you took a shot every time I started a thought with "now" or "so," you'd be dead.

Okay, that's all, bye.

A brief adendum to this post:

So I've done a bit more thinking, and somehow completely forgot about the fact that Miquella appeared in Caelid after Malenia bloomed, to help the wounded.

This does, at first blush, come off as quite the dick move on Miquella's part, as he didn't think to help his sister, but I do have some thoughts and speculations.

What if he couldn't? Like, he's a small guy, it's not like he could've carried her all the way back himself. Maybe he trusted Finlay (Malenia's gf, it's canon) enough to let her do it. I mean, I guess it depends on how he got to Caelid in the first place, but like how does anyone in this game get anywhere?

No one uses ships as far as I'm aware, and the only transportation we see is like horse or giant drawn carriages, which are already pretty slow. Maybe Finlay asked to carry her back. Maybe Miquella could have used Torrent, but idk. This is all just speculation on my end.

Anyway, I also think this points to my earlier speculation about Miquella's character thematically. He saw only the wounded he needed to help, but ignored the one closest to him in the process. This interpretation lends itself very well to the idea of his childlike, naive ideas of compassion.

Okay, that's really it this time. I'll probably talk about Leda and the others next.

Bye

#thoughts #elden ring #literary analysis #analysis #media analysis #shadow of the erdtree #elden ring dlc #elden ring miquella #miquella the kind #miquella the unalloyed #general radahn #Malenia

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sapphic-agent · 9 months

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Let's Talk About Izuku and Bakugou's Relationship

Happy New Year, everyone! Thought I'd kick 2024 off with a new post. I haven't written an in-depth analysis in a while, so I figured now was a good time.

So, I've touched on this before, many times in fact. If you've seen my other posts, you know that I think that the BKDK relationship is a clusterfuck of codependency, abuse, and toxicity. But I don't think I've ever analyzed it frame-by-frame, so here's an attempt.

Childhood

The lake scene has the most focus than any other flashback in the series. It's meant to show us why Bakugou hated Izuku; he assumed Izuku looked down on him and saw him as weak. It's supposed to support the idea that Bakugou has an inferiority complex that's been present since he was a kid and that's why he lashes out at Izuku and wants to be rid of him. Because Izuku makes him feel weak.

But this isn't true. Or, it doesn't paint the whole picture.

One thing the lake scene seems to gloss over is the fact that Bakugou was always mean to Izuku. Maybe he wasn't as harsh and could be written off as just a kid being a kid, but he still made fun of him. He still went out of his way to make him feel bad about himself and humiliate him. He called him "Deku" way before either of them were (or weren't) given a quirk.

And he only ever did this to Izuku, not the other kids part of his posse. He, even at such a young age, saw Izuku as an easy target, someone he could easily shove around because he knew Izuku wouldn't fight back (this would persist for the next ten years).

It's important to note that there's only one instance where Bakugou's behavior towards Izuku turns violent. It's when Izuku defends a kid that Bakugou and his posse are picking on. This is the moment where Bakugou becomes physically aggressive; not when he found out Izuku was quirkless, during the lake, or any time before. It's here, when Izuku stops being the defenseless wimp who won't stand up to him. He doesn't like that Izuku stepped out of the mold he had confined him to (I'll come back to this later).

The truth of their childhood together is that Bakugou was always inherently awful to Izuku. It wasn't like he experienced one bad moment that flipped a switch, Bakugou liked picking on Izuku from day one.

Middle School

There isn't much to say about their days at Aldera other than it's just a progression of escalation from their childhood. They've settled into their roles as abuser and victim. Bakugou knows he can say and do whatever he wants and Izuku won't defend himself because it's been the status quo for a decade.

He revels in that power he has over him, likes to remind Izuku of his "place." And if he steps out of line, Bakugou exerts that power over him to shut him right down, stressing his inability to do anything about his situation. It's a cycle of abuse.

Deku vs Kacchan Part 1

I've already talked about this scene before, but this is also another example as to what I was alluding to above.

As @delawaredetroit pointed out in a post from a while ago, Bakugou isn't feeling betrayed here. He himself has said time and time again that he and Izuku weren't friends. He cares about the fact that his victim now has power of his own.

All their lives, Bakugou had the power and Izuku was powerless. That was the dynamic they were used to and the one that Bakugou was aware and repeatedly took advantage of. But now, Izuku isn't powerless or defenseless. He no longer fits the mold that Bakugou had tied him to since childhood. That's why Bakugou is so upset; not because Izuku kept something from him but because the power imbalance between was shifting.

And it's why he tries to use guilt-tripping here. He wants Izuku to feel bad, wants to reestablish some of the control over him he just lost. And it works, because Izuku tells him he inherited his quirk completely unprompted after the fact. Bakugou knows he has the power in their relationship and has no issues abusing that power.

Sports Festival

I don't have much to say here, but I would like to point out something very inconsistent concerning Bakugou's interpretation of his relationship with Izuku. He claims that Izuku kept following him around and that he couldn't get rid of him, which attributed to his dislike. But even if that was true when they were 5, it's actually the opposite at least from middle school on.

Bakugou went out of his way to target Izuku in the first chapter/episode. He also tracked him down after the Sludge Villain incident. He's initiated every one of their confrontations in UA. And here, he deliberately eavesdropped on Izuku's conversation with Todoroki.

I don't know whether to call it hypocrisy or ignorance, but Izuku was content to leave Bakugou alone. Bakugou's the one who's constantly harassing and obsessing over him.

Final Exams

Izuku daring to display confidence and competence invokes immediate physical violence in Bakugou. He doesn't like that Izuku is talking to him like he's an equal, he doesn't like that Izuku dares to step outside of his role as a victim. Bakugou wants Izuku to act like he's below him and gets agitated when he doesn't do that. He, in this moment, cared more about putting Izuku in his place than his own grade.

Deku vs Kacchan Part 2

I mentioned that BKDK is codependent in the beginning of the post. This is what I mean.

Bakugou can't cope with the fact that he isn't the best and takes it out on the only target he has. Izuku had nothing to do with his shortcomings, but he still felt the need to establish superiority over him; a grasp for some measure of control.

Like I said above, he's well aware of the power he has over Izuku. Do you think he would have tried this with Todoroki? Or Tokoyami? Or Iida? No, because he knows that none of them would have even dignified him with a response. But he knows he can control Izuku in a way he can't with other people. He feels comfortable treating only Izuku as his emotional and physical punching bag.

The Apology

It's interesting that prior to apologizing for treating him badly, Bakugou proceeds to treat Izuku badly.

This interaction is important because it's their first major conflict after Bakugou's "redemption." We're supposed to be at the point where he's changed. But he still resorts to insults and goading. His first instinct is still to put Izuku down.

I've said most of what I needed to about the apology. But I do want to mention that coming from Bakugou's mouth, it grossly understates what happened during those ten years. Because the abuser is the one telling the story, his transgressions don't seem that bad. He's the one controlling the narrative, so his classmates- Izuku's friends- don't know the full story. They don't know what Bakugou put Izuku through. Bakugou comes off looking sympathetic to their peers by speaking "his truth."

Was this his intention? Probably not as Bakugou doesn't really care what others think about him. But it does raise the point that this is the extent as to how Bakugou sees his past self; as a stubborn, overzealous child and not the abuser that he was

#anti bakugou katsuki #anti bakudeku #romantic and platonic because both suck #mha critical #bnha critical #izuku deserves better #long post #relationship analysis #tw bullying #tw abuse #tw suicide baiting

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nekoning · 5 months

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[CW: mentions of grooming and SA]

i'm starting to watch baby reindeer and it's nothing like what i expected it to be and I'm a bit in shock because so far I've never related so much to a portrayal of grooming/SA

honestly none of the shows or movies I've watched before have gotten it just right like this show does, i think it's because most of those I've watched are situations where the victim doesn't develop a bond(? with their abuser and either they are abused by a stranger or a partner becomes suddenly abusive, but not many explore the complexities of grooming and how much it makes the abuse worse, a lot of them also make the abuse the plot of the story and don't focus on what happens after someone survives abuse or the before about what factors can make someone more vulnerable to being victims of grooming, a lot of stories don't focus on these parts because they are messy but they need to be talked about more

there were so many things i unfortunately related to, how being abused by someone you want approval of hurts so much, how you can both be afraid of and also look for comfort in the same person that abuses you, the feeling of wanting to somehow protect this person that has hurt you and blaming yourself. you try to empathize with someone who never had your feelings in mind, you try to find ways to "negotiate" during the abuse and you think it gives you some sense of control, that it means you can deal with this situation. you downplay what happened to you because it's easier to move on than face it.

the other part that is rarely explored in media and that I've only seen it twice before is the sexual confusion and the incessant wondering if you were fucked up from the start or if that person ruined you forever, this topic makes the average person very uncomfortable but it's so important that it's talked about because victims carry so much shame because of it.

brains have strange ways of coping with trauma and a lot of times for victims it means that they feel the need to recreate the abuse they experienced in a setting where they have control of the situation, it also means that a lot of us develop hypersexuality and will put ourselves in risky situations, sometimes without realizing that it's tied to the trauma.

unfortunately society's reaction to these things is...bad, very bad. people that don't understand how trauma works use it to argument that victims wanted their abuse to happen, people also shame those who use kink to cope and heal AND when people see victims actively showing these signs, instead of helping, a lot of people judge without questioning if something is going on below the surface (at least this was my case, when i was very obviously putting myself in risky situations i was seen as someone that had something inherently wrong with him instead of someone that needed help and people did absolutely nothing to put me away from risk!)

the fact that it's the story of a male victim of SA is also relevant bc it's generally seen as less serious, I've been laughed at before when talking about my abuse and people tend to treat it as something you should want to happen to you etc.

anyways i hope more stories of SA are more like this, i hope all these topics are explored no matter how uncomfortable they might be, i hope more stories cover grooming in specific

it's been important to me at least, trauma from grooming can be so isolating because you really only feel understood by people who have gone through the same and it's so messy and confusing and it impacts your life for years, decades down the line..the part of loving hating myself more than i loved her hit me extremely hard because that's what trauma does, it takes away anything good that could happen to you

if you made it to here and are considering watching keep in mind trigger warnings because it was a difficult but necessary watch for me

#baby reindeer #cw: sa mention

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exhaled-spirals · 7 months

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« Known globally for highly stylized genre films depicting the gritty underbelly of society with brutal violence and crimes, South Korean cinema was long characterized by what one film critic famously called “dark blue filter thrillers” mostly made by and starring men. If women appeared at all, it was often as one-dimensional clichés, serving as plot devices like a femme fatale, a murder or rape victim, an innocent lover or wife, or a self-sacrificing mother.

To challenge this norm and support women filmmakers, some women started to not only watch female-driven films but also buy more tickets than they could even use for such movies in a campaign called “spirit-sending”— meaning they would be at the theaters in spirit. The campaign turned a surefire box-office disaster to an award-winning hit, saving the career of a rare female director.

“It was truly a miracle,” Lee Ji-Won said of Miss Baek, her 2018 debut film about a female former convict trying to save a little girl from abusive parents. The drama, which portrays the friendship between two abuse survivors, was such a rarity in an industry dominated by what Lee called “films with cops, gangsters, naked women, or rom-coms” that it was snubbed by almost all investors and distributors. One investor promised to fund it only if Lee changed the lead character to a man. Another bet that “the disaster-in-waiting” would perish in cinemas in a week—a warning that almost materialized, as the film’s opening-day sales were so poor that it was projected to sell less than a quarter of the tickets required just to break even.

“Everybody, myself included, was so sure that the movie would crash and burn, and my career was over—until weird things started to happen on social media,” Lee told me.

Impressed by the rare women-led film with complex female characters, made by an even rarer woman director, many women watched it again and again, buying tickets even when they couldn’t attend. Ticket sales rebounded sharply as #SendingSpirit became a viral hashtag that continued for months until the film broke even. Miss Baek eventually won rave reviews and swept major awards, and the same investors who’d once snubbed Lee began to court her, begging to see her scripts.

“The gesture of solidarity by all these women was just overwhelming,” Lee said, wiping away tears. “They, like me, were so thirsty for movies portraying women as complex, multidimensional human beings.” In 2021, she finished shooting her second movie, featuring some of the country’s biggest stars.

The “spirit-sending” campaign lived on to drive the success of other women-led movies, like the film adaptation of Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982, allowing such films to defy the boycott campaigns that often targeted “feminism-stained movies.” While the film was hit by thousands of 0 percent ratings even before its official release (causing a vast gender disparity in its ratings on the top web portal—2.99 among men and 9.45 among women), Kim Ji-Young eventually became a hit watched by millions at home. Female-driven movies have grown in numbers and ticket sales since, led by a new generation of filmmakers like Lee and some male filmmakers as well. »

— Hawon Jung, Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement

#quote #hawon jung #flowers of fire #women #cinema #society #english

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heartgold · 8 months

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Something ingenious about ep3 is how Battler is at his worst here but in a markedly different way from his ep1 characterization... Also it's meta!Battler who acts that way rather than his piece, which marks not only the author shift but also this depiction being deeply allegorical

Like. Ep3 meta!Battler is super dismissive of Beatrice even as she tells him about the most horrific parts of her trauma through a fantasy lens that doesn't even obfuscate the worst of it (and Battler actually... manages to decipher it with some prodding from Ronove), and yet he still brushes it off. His relationship to Beatrice in the meta layer is super antagonistic at this point. He correctly figures out that she's confessing to something very painful but doesn't care to think about it or why she's bringing it up because she has already been characterized as a heartless cruel monster in his eyes, therefore she hasn't earned his sympathy and good faith. It might as well be a trick just to confuse him

The way their relationship improves the moment she starts "reforming" and acting all cute and pitiable is important because it shows her both playing into his fantasy of "fixing" her and making her change her ways just to sweep the rug from under his feet and prank him about it at the end AND playing into this good victim fantasy for herself and genuinely relishing in the understanding and good faith he was willing to extend to her once she played the role he wanted her to (this is blatantly Sayo's complex with becoming the person others want her to be in order to deserve their love... It hurts........)

This marking the author shift and being a meta-only dynamic is super interesting to me because it can mean so many things. I like to think of the metaworld as a representation of the journey in understanding the story from within. We know that from the IRL angle Tohya wrote ep3 while not knowing the full truth and believing Eva to be the most likely culprit based off snippets of memory and her survival. You could read Evatrice claiming the role of the antagonist while Beato goes through a "redemption arc" as Tohya struggling with his memories, deep down knowing the painful truth but being unable to access that memory or accept it, therefore pointedly scapegoating Eva to process his feelings of guilt and grief towards the witch

But by wishing her to be blameless and pinning everything on someone else he is neglecting her heart and looking away from her true feelings, from all the things she wanted to communicate and from all the circumstances that brought upon the tragedy (and ultimately, from Battler's sin). I can see this internal struggle being meta-translated as ep3 Battler being selfish like that and refusing to engage with Beatrice until she becomes "good"... You can feel a lot of self loathing in it. It's a rocky start to their parallel journeys until they both Get It and it's so interesting to me how, in hindsight, it's very clear that it truly starts when the stories change hands

Overall it's a VERY good discussion of projection, with the added lens of how we engage with stories. How only seeing what you want to see flattens the complexity of humans into characters. Beato's "redemption arc" is tropey for a reason! She even shouts out dating sims and anime as the inspiration for it to make it clear this was just her reducing herself to a character archetype! Umineko is very critical of the idea of redemption in the first place and it really shows here

#umineko #umineko spoilers #this was crossposted from twitter with only minor editing so sorry if the wording is awkward lol

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mal3vol3nt · 3 months

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This is kinda a long read. But I wanna ask your opinion on this. I see this one post saying Zutara is a purely female fantasy and that’s why so many people hate it. Basically saying it was made for girls, by girls, it has everything a girl wants in a relationship and “When people attack the idea of Zutara, this is fundamentally what they're attacking-women and girls wanting better for themselves in a relationship.”

Now I am just a man. But I think this argument especially the latter part is such a reach and a cope. I don’t see how shipping a fanon ship is some big feminist thing. There are women I know who love Kataang (and if you ask me most of what they’re describing Zutara is actually Kataang in disguise) and there are some guys who like Zutara (which is perfectly fine as long as you don’t write a slave-fic about it like this one guy.

Call me insensitive, but it seems like this guy has some weird victim complex.

Here’s the link BTW:

https://www.tumblr.com/longing-for-rain/753424994905800704/this-isnt-a-question-about-whether-or-not-zutara?source=share

i agree with you anon. i think it’s very silly that these people think a fandom ship is the peak of activism/feminism. such a claim, dare i say, reeks of white feminism, especially when you take into account that the ship they’re claiming is “so feminist” is a relationship between a canonical colonizer and a victim of genocide

the things the op of that zutara post listed are all very westernized “issues” that they claim shipping zutara is supposedly fighting against while also praising western standards, such as saying that zutara is for the girls who want to be with a man they’re attracted to, directly saying that aang is unattractive because he doesn’t fit western beauty standards whereas zuko does. as well as saying zutara is for the girls who want passion in their relationships, directly saying that zuko’s hot-headedness and western masculine qualities are hotter than aang’s pacifism and him being a monk. this claim is also pretty on par with how zutaras sexualize the relationship between zuko and katara, which i don’t even want to get into for obvious reasons. needless to say, i think all of these claims are very very stupid and so obviously come from someone who gravitates towards the racism of the show. sorry not sorry

these claims also come from someone who twists aang’s character so that they feel more justified in hating him, and who twist katara and zuko’s characters so their ship works better. because at no point in the show does it ever feel like katara is changing herself to be with aang, as if she would ever do that (i can tell this is a southern raiders argument—i swear these people misread and latch onto everything). at no point in the show does it ever feel like katara is unattracted to aang, especially since she’s the one who initiates both the first and the last kiss between them, is constantly touching him, and gives him kisses on the cheek in a way she doesn’t do with any one else (she also audibly gasps when she first sees his tattoos in episode 1, which could be read as just her being shocked because she’s never seen airbender tattoos before, but considering the fact her crush on him develops quickly by the beginning of book 2 and she marries him, i wouldn’t be surprised if she also liked the way they looked). all claims that fall back on katara forcing herself to be with aang for whatever reason are projection because 1) katara would never do that. she is not the kind of girl to force herself into any position that doesn’t make her happy, and we see her actively set boundaries with aang in canon, so she is obviously comfortable making her wants known, and 2) katara clearly doesn’t see things through the same lens as her so-called fans. just because you had a crush on zuko doesn’t mean that katara should too, and just because aang isn’t your type doesn’t mean he can’t be her type. yall are projecting onto her

the whole “zutara is for the girls” and “kataang is the male gaze” is so stupid because no, that’s not how that shit works and is a take that is so very american/western that i fail to take it seriously. and yes, i know atla is a western-created show with a western-intended audience, but the characters in the show aren’t and i feel it’s important to acknowledge that

now, i’m a girl (or a woman i should say, 19 years old lmao). and i live in a very patriarchal society and have dealt with sexist standards being forced onto me from my latino culture and family my whole life. it didn’t, however, take long for me to realize that i was unhappy with that way of life and have actively detached myself from it, instead gravitating towards fighting for and recognizing my freedom to choose. this is a freedom i believe all women should have, and i have dedicated myself to learning of the injustices women go through all over the world and do my best to fight against them from where i live. i detest the patriarchy and all things created that demean women or force them into any one role. i am also a lesbian who hardly ever thinks of men lmao. yet miraculously, i am a kataang shipper. according to these zutara stans, im a misogynist who prioritizes male pleasure and happiness. yet from what i know of myself, that’s not at all true. i couldn’t give less of a fuck about patriarchal standards and actively avoid them in the media i consume as much as i can. but i think kataang is cute and i turn away from the thought of zutara, so either one of two things are true:

kataang is for the girls and zutara is the male-gaze

or fictional character shipping has fuck all to do with activism and the kind of person you are in real life

i’m gonna go out on a limb and say number 2 is correct. whether you’re a zutara shipper or a kataang shipper, i don’t think that’s an instant tell of the kind of person you are in your real life. it’s not an actual tell of what you value and yall look ridiculous trying to paint one ship as better than the other on an innate moral level

at the end of the day, this is fandom shipping. you can be a horrible person who engages in shipping content and still be a horrible person at the end of the day regardless of which ship suits your fancy. cause it doesn’t fucking matter. neither of the ships are morally superior to the other in any way that has importance in the real world. yall need to get offline i swear

now personally, i think kataang is an infinitely better ship than zutara for many reasons that i have discussed before, so yall will never catch me saying kataang and zutara are equal in any other context but this one lmao

also saying any colonizer x colonized ship is superior will never be taken seriously by me. you can enjoy those kind of ships all you want, but they’ll never be my cup of tea and that doesn’t make me or anyone else anti-feminist or whatever the fuck insult zks throw out. i just prefer my ships to be between people who haven’t wiped out the other person’s race

#atla #avatar the last airbender #aang #avatar aang #katara atla #kataang #anti zutara stans #anti zutara fandom #anti zutara

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akingdomscrypt · 1 year

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Make a Mercy Out of Me

Part Three

Pairing; König x m!reader

Word Count; ~7.66k

Warnings; kinda sorta graphic depiction of stitching up wounds near the end. So if you don't like needles.. be careful.

A/n; König is a sergeant bc I said so and it fits my narrative. There's also plans in work for why he's a part of 141 & background knowledge on him. Lore. Eventually.

(we need more clips of this man istg-)

--- "babysitting duty" ---

You were a frustrating man to work with. You had hardly said much of anything during that sad excuse of an interrogation, at least nothing of much use. All they knew now was that there was someone out there who held your leash. Or, well, used to. You were a wildcard now, without someone to keep you on lock and key, and there was no way in the deepest pits of hell they could set you loose on the world with what they knew–which wasn't much. Not unless you were hanging off their every word or buried six feet under an unmarked grave.

"You talk about him like he's some sort of lab experiment."

"Mm." Well… "maybe he is. Who knows."

"He isn't some feral dog, König."

He didn't like it. As much as your words had ignited a–often ignored–spark in him, there was something itching at the back of his mind telling him you weren't trustworthy. That you'd stab him and the rest of the task force in the back the moment you were left to your own devices.

"We should keep him."

"He's a person."

"Not a good one."

"Neither are we."

They had to keep you, if at least for society's sake, on that straining lead. As any slack would surely be the catalyst of his very own demise.

I could make the world bleed.

The words were stuck on replay in König's mind, as well as the man who had spoken them. It was a horrible thought to have–but he couldn't help but find it.. intriguing. The idea made his heart skip a beat and the corner of his scarred mouth curl.

"He said he'd make the world bleed, König. That's fuckin' creepy as shite!" Ghost spat, arms crossed over his chest, as the two made the journey back to the rest of the team.

"You have said much stranger things, Ghost."

"You can't really be considerin' this." A few beats of silence from the larger man was all the confirmation Ghost needed. "Price would never agree to it."

"He said he could help."

"Help." Ghost huffed. "Right. Help with what exactly? He has no idea what we've been working on."

"Ja, he doesn't know. But what about that bomber? Could it be relevant?" Besides Mouse, the team had been tracking a much more persistent threat. Something that left behind more than just breadcrumbs in the form of mutilated bodies.

"...are you sayin' he could be involved in this?"

"He has been showing up right after every hit."

"Right." Ghost pauses in his tracks, turning his head slightly to look up at the other man. "So you think he's with them? Or.. maybe one of their targets?"

König comes to a stop too and takes a moment to mull it over. Could you have been a part of the group they'd been hunting these past few months? It was a little.. suspicious that you'd show up and take out another high-profile figure right after every strike made. Were you cleaning up their mess? Or your own?

"That's all the more reason to keep him, no? To find out? We know he has someone he reports to." There was also the fact that the explosion had gone off practically right under your own two feet. That had to mean something.

Just following orders?

"It's a little concerning when I of all people have to remind you that he is a very real, living, breathing, capable-of complex-thought person." König brushes off Ghost's concerns with a noncommittal shrug.

If they took the route of you having been just another victim of the explosion, that left many unexplained variables. Such as why you were a target–wouldn't one terrorist organization blend well with another? Why would they be at odds? It also leaves the question that, if you had really been abandoned by your crew, why had "she"–the woman who you'd mentioned–left you for dead? Was it legitimate? Or a ploy of some kind?

Then there was the more believable scenario that would tell it as; you hadn't really been betrayed by your group, or whoever held your metaphorical leash. And the explosion was some kind of distraction, a way to get their attention. Maybe–if one applies the theory that you were in cahoots with the people they'd been hunting–you had wanted to get caught. Or, maybe not you specifically, but whoever "she" was. Maybe you were sent as bait and they'd fallen right into that mouse trap–heh.

Maybe you didn't even know this was all a farce. That would make it all the more believable, no?

Either way, they need you here. For information. And if they played their cards right, if they burrowed their way under your skin and into your heart–like a damn parasite–you would give them exactly what they wanted. Lead them right to both the core of your organization and the group behind the bombing. And if the people or persons behind the bombing were by some miracle connected to who they had been tracking…

"He can help." His words help a certain air of finality to them, a small grin making an appearance under his hood.

Another sigh, but not a no.

Price wasn't as thrilled by König's proposal as Ghost begrudgingly was.

"You want to what." König wasn't a fearful man–unless he was ordering from a drive-thru, that shit was terrifying–but when the Captain looked at him like that. Let's just say he was forever grateful for the cloth that obscured almost the entirety of his face.

"Keep him." And if his voice comes out a little smaller than normal… no one mentions it.

To his right, König hears Ghost let out another heavy sigh. For a man who used to take a blowtorch to a hostage's skin and quite literally wears a skull stitched onto his face every day- if you'd asked König, he'd tell you the Lieutenant had grown soft. Or, well, soft-ish. He would still slit a man's throat without question.

"Why'd you wanna do that?" Gaz pipes up, giving König a blank, indecipherable expression. Coupled with his tone, König couldn't tell which side of the fence he was leaning towards. He knew Gaz, out of all of them, was the one with a more strict moral compass–something König both admired and thought of as foolish–but he also already didn't like their current hostage. So, discerning whether the other man would be for or against his proposition was a complex feat. König would have to walk that fine line, choose his words carefully, to sway Gaz's opinion in his favor.

"We could use his help." Is what König finally lands on. Not leaning too far into what Ghost had described as treating you like a tool, but not dipping into friendly territory either. An even middle ground.

"From what Ghost and I managed to gather," well, König had gathered. Ghost more or less just stood in the background as a silent spectator. "He claims he's been abandoned by someone he'd only refer to as "she". That this woman brought him here from wherever he came from to follow some lead- but that lead seems to have been a dead end."

"A dead end?" If Gaz's thing was compassion and strict morals, Soap's was intrigue. Puzzles and demolitions, that's all it took to draw in their resident impulse-driven pyromaniac.

"A dead end," König repeats, now switching his attention to the Scotsman. "Turns out there was no target, not really. Or, at least, that is what it appears like at first glance."

Soap's eyes light up when König moves to reach into his pocket, fishing for the blank note. Bingo.

"At first, when we pulled this off him, we had assumed it to be blank," he unfolds the crinkled-up paper, mud, water stains and all. König reaches his hand out to pass the note to Price, keeping the others on the edge of their seats. "But if you take another look.."

Price inspects it with a deep frown, then passes it to Gaz, who looks at it with a skeptical raise of his brow, next is Soap then Ghost, and finally back around to König. Upon closer inspection, past all the grime and stains, there was a faint red scribble.

"It is like there was something here," he mutters, smoothing a gloved thumb over the worn parchment as if that will somehow make the faded words clearer.

"But someone must've purposefully scrubbed it away." Ghost adds, seeming much more interested than he had earlier.

Any other person would probably have brushed the now-pinkish, washed-out markings as blood. And König almost had; after all, you were practically swimming in your own blood right now. Clothes stained with it far past recognition.

Even so, he knew that wasn't it.

The paper had a slew of things it was coated in–some recognizable, some not–, but blood was, surprisingly, not one of them.

"Dae ya think 'e knows?" Two.

"Maybe he was the one who erased it?" Three.

"We won't know unless we ask him. But,"

They all look over to Price, waiting for the man's next words with bated breaths.

"We can't jus' do it outright." Price's steely gaze lands on König and he subconsciously stands a little taller.

"König's got the right idea. We can't jus' kill 'im. Not yet." Four. "Not until we know everything he does."

"Aye, Captain." Soap grins, pushing up from where he'd been resting against a wall. He tilts his head in the direction Ghost and König had come from. "Let's go wear 'im down then, yeah?"

"Preferably before he bleeds out." Ghost reluctantly grumbles. "Bastard already looks to be halfway through death's door."

Price looks to König, cocking his head slightly to the right.

"You said he believes he was abandoned, right?"

"That is correct, sir." The corner of Price's mouth ticks up.

"So no one's coming for 'im then?"

A sick twist of anticipation began to swell in König's chest, and suddenly he was a lot more confident than he was a few seconds ago.

"Precisely."

The last thing you were expecting after those two giants left was for them to return with the whole damn crew. You'd be lying if you said the leader didn't make every inch of your being tense up. There was just something in his eyes; that cool blue, warmer than König's but still so cold, gave off a deceiving "I'm not a threat" while simultaneously saying "flinch and I'll kill you".

The dark-skinned man and the baby-faced one stood a little ways behind you, and closer to the door. The leader took a seat in the chair König had been sitting in–assuming the same position the Austrian had. Skull-face stood in the same place and König took his place on your right-hand side. Standing just far enough behind you to barely graze your peripheral but close enough where you could feel his presence looming near you. Invading your personal little space bubble with his, so close if he leaned any closer he'd be brushing up right against you.

The leader tried his hand at interrogating you again. It went a little something like this;

"Do you know why she left you?'

"Probably had something to do with my bad attitude."

He gives you an unimpressed look. You simply raise your eyebrows in question. You had broken your vow of silence, but that didn't mean you were going to make it easy on them.

"König said you could help us. Mind tellin' me what exactly you could do to help?"

"I have connections. People who owe me a favor or two." Or five. Hey, in your defense, you had been in the game for a while.

"Are these connections… legal?"

"I highly doubt you care about legalities if you are conversing with me still," Then, just to be a little shit, you add a snide, "sir."

You swear you hear a small huff behind you and you brush it off as a figment of your imagination. After all, you had lost a ton of blood.. It was a miracle you hadn't passed out again from blood loss. At this rate, you should probably be dead. Or, at the very least, comatose or something. Not back-talking the man who was very literally your golden ticket to freedom.

You blamed it on the blood loss. Made you say stupid shit.

"What else can you offer us?" In other words; why should we keep you?

"One less Brit in your ranks?"

"..what?"

"You all could really use some diversity."

There's a pregnant pause before,

"Is making jokes all you're good for?" Skull-face speaks up from behind the leader.

"What can I say? It is part of my charm."

The bearded man in front of you lets out a heavy sigh. Something about that sigh told you this type of thing wasn't new to him. A small part of you perked up with curiosity. You then proceed to beat that part of you back down into a bloody pulp.

"Are you goin' to take this seriously or not, Mouse?" The leader captures your attention again and you shrug. You really should take this more seriously… but the lack of vital, life-supporting fluid in your system was making you loopy.

And stupid.

"König?"

Very stupid.

A small grunt from behind you.

"Hast du darüber nachgedacht, was ich gesagt habe?" (Have you thought about what I said?)

The man in front of you frowns, looking from you to König, to you again. But he doesn't stop you. Someone probably should.

There's a terse silence before König replies.

"Deshalb sind sie hier." (That's why they're here.)

Despite your slightly dazed state, you smile a little to yourself.

"Did you tell him?" Now the leader looks even more confused, if not a little more frustrated. Good.

"Tell me what?" His glare is now trained on König, and you know you've gotten the giant into deep shit now. Even better.

"Nein."

And just like that you, very foolishly, let out a small puff of what was obviously an attempt at laughter. Though a poor one.

At this is rate, you'd sooner get yourself killed than cut loose, but your mouth seemed to have a mind of its own. It also seemed to be keen on digging you into deeper shit.

"It is a good deal.." you trail off, narrowing your eyes a little at the leader. It would be great if you knew their names. But no one seemed interested in filling you in on that, so you continue, "you all could really use the help. After all, the only reason you lot even caught me was 'cause I was having a bit of a bad day."

"A bit of a bad day?" Leader asks.

"Aye," you drawl. Your heart thudded a few times in your chest, slowed, then picked back up again. Really, you should be dead, slumped over in your chair, by now. "Got blown up. Stabbed a few times.. broke a few bones.."

You give a sloppy grin beneath your mask. Yeah, definitely shouldn't be awake right now. "Bit of a bad day."

"He's useless like this, Cap'." One of the men from somewhere by the roll-up door pipes up.

"Agreed." Skull-face huffs. "Poor guy's all hopped up on adrenaline. He's not much use to us now."

The leader–Captain?–scrutinizes you for a few more moments before exhaling heavily.

"Alright." He grumbles, standing up from the chair.

"König," the Brit calls on the man beside you but keeps his stare trained on you, as if daring you to utter another smart-assed quip. "You were so damn adamant about keeping 'im, yeah?"

It's obviously a rhetorical question and the atmosphere shifts, the tension in the air palpable.

The leader, or, you guess, Captain–these men and their pretentious titles..–adjusts the beige-colored, boonie hat on top of his head and signals something to the two men by the door. You hear the telltale clanking of the metal being rolled up.

"You're on babysitting duty, Sergeant," he says in that displeased rumble–one you had become very familiar with during the first attempt at interrogation–as he makes his way for the door. "So get his arse back in the van, we're moving to someplace more permanent."

The other three men proceed to file out after their Captain, leaving you alone with the, now fuming, Austrian.

Annnnnnd…

"Maus." He grits out from behind you. You proceed to, very smartly, not respond.

Shit.

Instead, you stay stock still even as König leans over you and unsheathes a knife from someplace on his person. One heavy hand gripping your, thankfully, non-injured shoulder and the other reaching around to rest the blade beneath your chin. He urges your head up with the tip of it until your eyes–oh, yeah, he was definitely pissed–lock with his. In the short time you'd known him you had almost forgotten how downright intimidating only being able to see those pale, glowing blues staring through your very soul was.

"Sie werden es bereuen." (literal; you will regret it. Contextual; you're going to regret this.)

He, while maintaining eye contact, removes the knife and brings it down to hover just above your waist. Your own gaze can't help but flick between his and his weapon-welding hand. Self-preservation, you call it. König, after all, has that sharp metal alarmingly close to your dick.

You choose to ignore the thrill that causes your breath to hitch, an unfamiliar feeling stirring somewhere in the deepest pits of your hindbrain.

You watch as he–in a strange show of caution–places the gloved hand that had been on your shoulder beneath the coarse rope, thumb and fourth finger keeping the binding in place, and swiftly slices through the thickly twined fibers. He then makes quick work of doing the same to the rope wrapped around your thighs and ankles. The barest hints of warmth emitting from him easily seep through the thin, ruined cloth of your pants. But before you can think too much about how long it's been since you last felt the touch of another not-currently-dying human being, König pulls back.

When you look back up to search out his gaze you find he is no longer staring you down, his own focus entirely on freeing you from the bindings. The lack of pressure on your worn body is a relief and the next breath that leaves you is shakier than the last–you choose to believe it's just your body coming down from its adrenaline high.

The last of the rope that had been keeping your lower half bound to the chair falls away to the floor with a soft thump and König retreats completely to move onto your hands. Thank fuck for your own fabric-clad hands, you aren't sure how much more of this non-threatening touch you could take before you fucking imploded or something. All you can feel is the slight graze of his deft fingers against your concealed wrists, and even that is muted. Courtesy of the current lack of decent blood circulation to your bound extremities.

After that final piece of rope is removed, you're being yanked to your feet. Off-balanced and stumbling as blood rushes back to every limb, you nearly come crashing straight back down. König's firm hold on your forearm is the only thing that keeps you from taking an embarrassing nosedive into hard concrete.

Panting heavily behind the fabric of your mask, you groan as the world swims around you. König only spares you a few seconds to steady yourself and then he's making a sudden appearance in front of you and trading out his grip on your forearm to engulf your wrist–and subsequently almost your entire hand–in one large hand. He wastes no time in tugging you forward to follow in his footsteps.

You realize quickly that the time between the rest of the group leaving and König's undoing of your bindings hadn't really been more than a few moments–half a minute at most–, as the other members of König's team were just now turning a corner and leaving your field of vision.

How embarrassing, you think, it felt like a fucking eternity.

König easily uses his tight grasp on your wrist to lift you up just enough so you don't have to make the small hop off of the elevated ledge and out of the storage unit–thank fuck it wasn't your injured arm. You aren't sure whether to be annoyed at his blatant show of strength–seriously, the movement seemed entirely effortless on his part–or grateful you didn't have to make the jump. Your depth perception wasn't exactly the best right now and you probably would've just fallen right over. You doubted you would have even had the energy to catch yourself.

The walk out of this seemingly abandoned facility and back out into the scalding heat–huh, they must not have taken you very far–was surprisingly quick. Your barely lucid brain blocked out the majority of the dizzying twists and turns it took to find the exit. And soon enough you find yourself back in the loading space of that damn van.

This time you are mostly conscious, so you're granted the wonderful opportunity of bearing witness to the burning glares of the three other men seated on the opposite bench. König takes his place beside you and actively decides to not even glance in your direction. Instead silently communicates something to the other passive-aggressive passengers. Well, skull-face was definitely more on the aggressive side of the spectrum, but you were mostly certain he couldn't do anything. Or so you hoped.

The baby-faced one was looking at you with more curiosity than anything, a minor hint of defense hidden somewhere in those–why the hell does everyone here have the same eyes??–vivid blues. That barely concealed interest was more terrifying than skull-face's obvious death stare.

The Captain turned his attention to the Austrian beside you, nonverbally communicating his displeasure with a hard glare and deep frown. Ah, the dark-skinned man must've been the one driving the damn thing.

After a few more painstaking minutes of having a half-assed staring contest with the two men across from you, you give up and let your eyelids fall half-shut. Still nauseous with blood loss and possible infection, you pant lightly within the confines of your mask. Heat continues to build in the suffocating cloth and you let out another soft groan, unable to help yourself when you slump backward against the metal wall of the vehicle.

The ground moving beneath you does nothing to aid your current lightheadedness and you find yourself focusing most of your limited attention span on not vomiting in your mask. That would be a hellscape on its own to clean, and the humiliation would probably kill you off before the budding infection had the chance.

It doesn't take much time before you can no longer fight off the exhaustion weighing down the big ball of throbbing pain that is your entire body and your eyelids finally slip shut. Before you have the chance to force your eyes open again–this is definitely not an ideal place to fall asleep–a sudden heavy thwack against your mutilated shoulder does the job for you.

Your eyes snap back open, fully alert as you search out the culprit. You find König giving you a blank, deadpan stare and the venomous words sprouting on the tip of your tongue quickly fizzle out when you notice the van has stopped moving. In fact, you two are the only ones remaining inside. The other four are piling up just out of earshot, the backdoors wide open and showing off- well, nothing. It's dark and all you can make out are vague shapes in the background.

You huff and go to stand but König beats you to it. Still holding onto your wrist, he gives a sharp tug and you stagger out of your seat. You send him a seething glare but find that his attention is no longer on you.

König pulls you out the same way he had the storage unit; efficiently lifting you by your arm and out of the vehicle. You barely manage to keep your balance when your boots touch solid ground again and just that little bit of exertion has you sucking in ragged gulps of air.

When the Captain glances over to you two, König makes a show of lifting your arm into the air as if to say got it and the Captain gives a small nod in acknowledgment. You don't have the wherewithal to give a shit about being treated more like an object than a person, brushing it off and trading it out to take in your surroundings instead. Besides, it wasn't something you were exactly.. unfamiliar with.

Surrounding you is another compound. More well-kept than the storage facility you had previously been in, but still obviously worn. The stark white walls were practically glowing in contrast to the pitch-black, starless night sky. Besides some crumbling and scuff marks here and there–most likely from environmental weathering over time–the cinder block walls were almost pristine.

Your fuzzy, mush of a brain briefly considers asking König where the hell they had brought you, but your tongue is like lead in your mouth. Not that it really mattered, you highly doubt he would've told you anyway. You were a prisoner, after all. A prisoner who they were only keeping alive on the off-chance you could help.

Help with what exactly? You had not a clue. Hopefully, they'd soon get their shit together and tell you sooner rather than later. Then again.. what would they do with you once your use to them came to an end? Would they just end up killing you anyway?

Floodlights abruptly make an unwelcome appearance, bathing the courtyard in a blindingly white light and knocking that train of thought right out of your head. You cringe away from the sudden brightness, squeezing your eyes shut momentarily before blinking a few times in rapid succession to adjust.

You only have the time to register the sheer size of the compound before you are being tugged forward again and into the said building. As usual, you silently curse König's unfairly long legs and subsequent far longer strides as you try your damnedest to keep up. The nausea, burning full body ache, and pounding against your skull have yet to lessen. If anything it's become more of an issue now that you're not running on pure adrenaline.

You find yourself fumbling over your own miscalculated steps more often than you make a successful one, König having to more or less drag the majority of your dead weight along with him. The behemoth of a man doesn't even have the decency to make it look like doing so is any struggle. Bastard.

The interior lighting of the compound is somehow far much worse than the blaring exterior. You squint against the harsh brightness and it takes a few seconds for your pulpy mess of a brain to make out the shapes and colors in front of you. Or, well, the astonishing lack of colors. Dull shades of grey coupled with a blinding light. Perfect.

Someone's talking. Multiple someone's, really. But your ears are too stuffed full of cotton to make any sense of what's being said. The most you can do is try to read their lips–which proves to be futile–and try to gauge the emotional state of the men in the room.

The plainly, uniform-dressed men standing guard seem to not at all have a problem with the crew that had brought you in. Though obviously holding a subordinate position in comparison to the team, they shared easy smiles and small laughs with the group. The Captain appears to be keeping up a polite kind of façade–was this not his base?–as he converses with the two newbies. Skull-face, mohawk guy, and the Captain's obvious favorite all stand behind the Captain in an organized order. With skull-face standing the closest–was he some kind of right-hand man?–babyface and the third man stood at a respectful distance. Not too close, but just near enough to assist if needed.

König kept you a little more ways away from the others, a firmer grip on your wrist than before. It would probably hurt if the remainder of your body wasn't currently one giant sore spot. You realize why when one of the guards spares a glance at you and, spotting your eyes on him, immediately shrinks back and averts his gaze.

Ah, this definitely wasn't their base. Made sense. They all were clearly European and unfamiliar with the normalities of wherever the fuck you all were right now. Faintly, you remember the dark-skinned man complaining about how weird it was driving on the right-hand side of the road.

You're snapped out of your own musings by a harsh pull on your arm. A small noise of surprise escapes you and, before you know it, the guards are moving out of the way and you are being escorted further into the building.

Going off the darkness you had awakened to, it is obviously late at night, maybe even well into the morning by now, and the only people you all pass are all exhausted-looking security personnel.

König follows behind the other four down corridor after corridor, dragging you along behind him. Eventually, you all make it out into what appears like a sort of gathering place or common room. For a split second you think they're going to stop there, but, no, they keep going. Down more confusing hallways and through nonsense doors.

Then finally, finally, it all comes to a stop at an unremarkable metal door. Nothing on it, not even a little window, with the exception of the room number plastered next to it.

You squint at the numbers, trying to make sense of the blurry shapes. There's a small tugging in the back of your mind and, if you were any more aware, you'd almost say it was familiar. Huh.

The Captain unlocks and pushes open the door, then, before you even have the opportunity to protest, König yanks you close and shoves you forward. You stumble–again, seriously, did they think you were made of fucking steel??–through the doorway and only barely manage to break your fall on the closet wall. You stand there for a moment, panting and bracing against hard concrete, while the others file in.

If it wasn't for the unnecessarily heavy thunk you probably wouldn't have realized that the door had been shut. Your vision blurs then blacks out for a split second while you catch your breath, and the only thing on your mind is; how the hell am I not dead yet?

You're only given a few more moments of rest then you're being pulled by the wrist again. Unable to even really feel your legs anymore, the sudden brushing of something solid against the backs of your knees is all you have to tell you you've even moved. You don't have to be told twice to sit, hell, you probably wouldn't have been able to hear them if they had given the order.

You drop your weight instantly, unable to hold yourself up any longer. You can't feel much through the fabric separating your fingertips from what's below, but from the slight give when you press down, if you had to guess, you'd say you were seated on a cot of some kind. It's not the most comfortable, but it's the best thing you've had in a long, long while.

Lifting your gaze at the sound of someone's voice, you blink rapidly in a vain attempt at refocusing your vision.

"Hm?"

All four men standing in the room give you vaguely concerned grimaces. Well, you assume König and skull-face do, judging by the crinkling of their limited expression.

"I said-" the Captain begins. Not that you hear any of what comes after that. Head full of cotton and feeling simultaneously like you're both floating and being weighed down by a ship's anchor, you're left futilely trying to read his lips. But that only makes the pounding in your head worsen and you screw your eyes shut again.

Cradling your head in your hands you lean down, elbows propped up on your knees. You suck in shallow, shaky breaths, fruitlessly trying to get the proper amount of oxygen to the lump of mass that is your brain.

When your eyes flutter open again the lights have been dimmed just enough to take the edge off, reducing the strain on your eyes, and you immediately slump in relief. You think you mutter your gratitude under your breath, but, really, you're far too out of it to be certain.

A few more muffled words and the soft thumping of footsteps later and the door opens then shuts one last time. You look up expecting to see nothing but an empty room, a little caught off guard when that behemoth of a man is still looming near the door.

"We should really get you checked out," König says, giving a brief once-over at your disheveled appearance. Giving a noncommittal hum, you take a look down at yourself.

You had not bothered to take full stock of your person since the initial confrontation–and even that was a laughable inspection at best.

Every inch of your exposed skin–which, truthfully, wasn't much–was coated in a layer of mud and your own blood. Your thin civilian outfit was in a similar state of disrepair; caked in blood, more mud, and bits of stuck-on foliage as well. Accompanied with the occasional tear and hole here and there, of course.

"I'll get a medi-" Before he even gets the word out you're launching yourself up and off the bed. Charging at him despite how unsafe that currently is and reaching up to slam your grimy, gloved hand over where you assume his mouth is.

König quickly and easily peels your hand away by the wrist, staring down at you with less anger and more of a really, what are you doing? kind of look.

"Nie." (No.) You breathe as your only explanation. You had had enough of fucking medical staff in your time before your years-long solo operation began. Unknown injections, emotionless stares, and needles. Needles, needles, needles. So many fucking needles. You didn't visit those sterile, frigid laboratories often these days–though you were still required to come in every now and again for a routine 'checkup'.

"No?" König finally breaks through your suddenly hazy headspace–this time said fuzziness wasn't the result of excessive blood loss. You'd rather it were.

"Nie." You repeat again, and there must be something in your voice–something unlike yourself, something a bit too human–because König relents without further question and drops your arm.

"I can't really let you die on us, Maus." He points out with a deadpan stare. Then, probably realizing that phrasing sounded a bit too worried, he adds, "What use would you be to us then?"

"Let me do it."

"You can barely stand up straight and you expect me to hand you a needle?"

"I would rather me than you or some pea-brained white-coat." You huff, narrowing your still very unfocused gaze up at him. You hope it lands, you can't really see clearly right now.

König holds your stare for a few seconds longer before letting out a resigned sigh and looking away. "Fine."

He gives your uninjured shoulder a nudge with a gloved finger and rumbles a low, "Sit down."

You're about to bite back with some witty retort but the words get stuck in your throat when you realize just how close you two are. In your rush to cut off the words spewing from his mouth, you had somehow ended up crowding into his space in a very.. unprofessional way. Chest puffed up in a show of defiance and, subsequently, pressed right up against the other man.

That same, unfamiliar twinge in the furthest recesses of your mind from back in that god-awful storage unit begins to stir and you jolt away sharply. Jumping back and scurrying over to the cot at a faster rate than really necessary, as if that simple touch had burnt you. And, to be frank, it had. Indirectly.

König cocks his head, analyzing you for a brief moment, then shakes it off. Thank fuck. Having quickly averted your gaze, all you hear is some faint rustling and then his legs appear in your line of sight. A small first-aid box materializes from his hand and you lift your own trembling one to take it.

"Thanks." You mumble. You were a monster, not impolite.

König makes a light huff and retreats. Grateful for the, mostly likely unintended, room to breathe, you fumble with the kit before finally managing to wrench the damn thing open. Placing the box beside you on the bed you ungracefully free your first victim from its confines; your thigh.

Stab wound number one, thankfully, has stopped bleeding. On the other, far less favorable, hand, the injury is already a burning, angry red. A light poke at the inflamed skin with your finger has you hissing against the sharp sting.

Deciding keeping up appearances was much less important than your health, you make efficient work of removing both gloves. Also soaked with mud and blood, they would do no more than worsen what was already the beginnings of a very, very serious infection.

There's a bottle of saline solution in the kit and you uncap that first. Folding the bled-through, makeshift bandage in half, you use it to catch the liquid rather than letting the filthy solution drip onto the floor. After flushing out the wound as much as you can–without running the bottle dry, you've still got another to clean–the next step is the worst of them all. Stitches.

If you had it your way, you wouldn't use them at all. You had a tendency to forgo using a needle and thread whenever you could–only stooping to that level when it was absolutely vital. Like right now.

Even then, you only knew one form of sewing; intermittent sutures.

Tearing open a sterile needle packet you, surprisingly enough, make easy work of threading the surgical cotton through the eye of it. Pinching the slice shut with your non-dominant hand, you position the end of the curved metal about a centimeter from where the damn thing starts.

The first pierce of the needle into your tender flesh forces a strained whine from your throat, eyes beginning to water. You blink away the budding tears, exhale a shaky breath, and tie the thread off.

One suture down, an ungodly amount remaining.

Your hand only gets more unsteady as time goes on. Making each stitch more lopsided than the last.

Your vision swims for a brief moment and you swallow back the growing lump in your throat. Come on now, you can do this. You've done this so, so many times before. What was so different this time around?

Just a few more to go. That's all. Then you will be done.. well, then onto the puncture in your shoulder. The shoulder that also happened to be connected to your dominant hand. Great.

"Maus."

You can do this- just stab, push through- wait no, not like that. Pull it out again. Now, do it properly this time-

"Maus." Black gloves invade your sight and you grunt, trying to look around them.

The next time the needle pierces your skin it goes in just short of perfectly–success!–but it's good enough. Will keep your blood in, at least. Then comes tying it off and- come on, don't be difficult now.

Just toss over- like tha- wait, no. Just lift and- fuck.

A low rumble is all you hear and then those gloved fingers are wrapping around your wrist once more and effectively halting your progress. You huff, looking up to glare at him only to find his own hardened gaze staring down at you.

"-keep trying, you are only going to hurt yourself." Wait, had he been talking this whole time? "Then what use would you be then, hm? You would be of no help if you died because of your own damn stubbornness."

You feebly try to tug your hand back, but he doesn't budge, simply using his other hand to pluck the needle from your hand. Narrowing your eyes, you do the only thing you can do; throwing hundreds of imaginary knives at that stupid smug look in his eyes and internally cursing him out.

After your two's little staring contest goes on long enough for your captured hand to start going numb, you relent. Letting out a heavy sigh and dropping your gaze.

König makes a small noise of approval and releases your wrist. You don't watch as he finishes up the mess of stitches sewn into your thigh, nausea returning with a vengeance and forcing you to shut your eyes again.

He finishes up relatively quickly, faster than you probably could have in this state, and rinses the wound again before pasting a bandage over it.

"I need you to look up."

"Hm?" Light pressure under your chin causes your eyelids to flutter back open and you frown.

"Wha-?"

"Up." He reasserts, using his guiding touch to urge your head up and out of the way. Forcing you to straighten out your shrimp-like posture and provide König with access to your injured shoulder.

Said shoulder that was more bruises and blood than it was untouched flesh; able to get a decent look at it now that König had removed the sloppy work that was your mess of torn fabric and duct tape.

He repeats the same steps you had to clean the wound and this time you watch. Less so keeping an eye on the weeping wound and more so on the hand sticking the–new, he had discarded the one used on your thigh–thin metal through your skin. He's surprisingly delicate with it, despite his size he is far more precise with his sutures than you had been. Carefully inserting the needle and tying off every knot with practiced ease. Unlike you, he hadn't foregone his gloves, and that's why you notice it when you do. Having been so attuned to his busy hands.

His gloves are still stained with your blood.

Coated in a thick, dried layer of it. Dark against the already black fabric, flakes of crimson chipping off and drawing your eye.

It was the only part of him that showed any hint of wear from the morning's efforts. Every other inch of his uniform was speck-free, not a single item out of place, scuff mark, or splatter of blood.

It didn't make much sense for you to be fixated on such a minor facet after the laborious events of today. There were so many other things to draw your attention. Like the repeated motions of the curved metal puncturing your skin over and over again, for example. Or maybe his close proximity–accompanied by that weird feeling again.

But, no. Every last bit of your remaining attention span was focused solely on your own blood marking his hands. You sounded insane, even to yourself and that was an entire feat of its own.

You release a small breath of relief when he pulls away, slapping on another thick bandage over your second, freshly stitched injury. Then comes a sudden sting right above your eyebrow and you jolt away with a hiss.

Refocusing back into reality, König is still standing above you. Only this time he's welding an antiseptic-soaked cotton ball, also tarnished with your blood.

"Cut is deep." Is the vague explanation you get, coupled with a small gesture to your face. "No stitches will be needed. But,"

He reaches down to rifle through the first aid kit and makes a soft sound of victory when he finds whatever he's looking for. Holding your face still in one hand, he dabs at the cut a few more times before switching sides and drying it off. König throws the dirtied cotton along with wherever he'd discarded the scraps of your clothes and other miscellaneous trash.

Next comes another burning sting as he presses something over the wound. A few 'something's.

"A few pieces of tape should do the trick." He muses as he smoothes the sterile strips against your skin, the faint metallic scent of your own blood flooding your senses. Gross.

You really needed some sleep, or maybe it was finally time to check yourself into some kind of mental reform. Seriously, this was getting out of hand.

"Now," König pulls away for the final time, doing a brief scan of your exhausted form and nodding to himself. "Sleep."

You half expected König to leave it at that, to exit the room like the other four had. And probably lock the door behind him. Your hopes are crushed when he takes a seat a few feet away from your cot, settling into an uncomfortable-looking chair you hadn't noticed beforehand.

Oh, right. The Captain had assigned him as your personal babysitter. How fucking lovely.

Scooting back to slump against the wall furthest away from the other man, you send him a weak glare. Wanting nothing more than to argue that you can't sleep like this–not with him watching over you like some damn stalker–you find that when you try, you can't.

For what feels like the millionth time today, your eyelids droop until you cannot resist any longer. Falling completely shut and likely not going to open for a while, you give in. Unable to find it in yourself to give a damn right now.

Besides, you could.. moderately trust König wouldn't murder you in your slumber. He hasn't yet. And that seems to be enough for your sleep-deprived brain, as sweet unconsciousness soon drags you under.

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astrolovecosmos · 1 year

Text

Saturn's Shadows

Saturn is associated with "the shadow", things that are unacceptable or unknown. One form of maturity the planet stands for is accepting, recognizing, or transforming "the shadow". "By accepting the despised qualities of the shadow, the soul becomes whole, free from fear and self-condemnation." - Judy Hall. Saturn in Aries: Impulsiveness, anger, competitiveness, and ego are all buzzwords that can be used to describe Saturn in Aries's "shadow" side. But there is a lot to look at in terms of empowerment and loss of power. Please remember Saturn in Aries may not always mean the individual has a bad temper, but that they may be greatly shaped by anger from others. Saturn in Aries can struggle with the sharpest sides of impulsiveness and foolhardiness. There can also be a great fear of acting with decisiveness, confidence, and action. They may have a complex relationship with their hotter, passionate side. Maybe they believe a temper and confidence are the only ways to assert ones self and yet at the same time finds great shame when they do show anger, passion, enthusiasm, or bravery. Independence and separation may be a great shadow for this placement too. There can be unhealthy self-reliance and detachment or a reckless person who tends to burn and self-sabotage relationships. From ideas of separation, individuality, and independence is also someone who can grow to be very selfish OR may need to grow more towards self-focus. Accepting their flaws and introspection in general will be a great challenge but is necessary for freedom and personal power for this placement. Their shadow is a burning one and there is more than just taming or dousing it to address their unaccepted side.

Saturn in Taurus: Control and possessiveness are murky parts of this placement. The unaccepted or doubtful side of themselves may involve stubbornness and a fear of losing control or the unknown. Saturn in Taurus is associated with finding inner security as part of their growth. It may be this placement strives for security through control or learned from others control is how you find safety and reliability. It may not be a matter of control but of stagnation, caution, and a closed mind that this placement struggles with. Patience, peace, and determination may all be areas this Saturn has a complicated relationship with. These individuals may feel like the traits above are not valued or respected, or they may view these as traits out of reach somehow. Saturn in Taurus grows through steadiness, tenacity, and learning when to wait and when to steamroll. The real and practical world plays a big role in their maturity, growth, and also parts of themselves they hide or label as negative/dark. This could mean they fall victim too easily to society's standards or maybe they face many challenges with money, possessions, and property. They may face issues around jealousy, vanity, greed, and materialism as well. I would also believe all forms of security are a matter of importance from emotional to physical. There is a desire to be strong, sturdy, and content, comforted, or safe for this placement and from this comes parts of themselves they don't like, accept, or understand.

Saturn in Gemini: A struggle to communicate and express is a common interpretation of Saturn in Gemini's shadow. Insecurities around learning, knowledge, and education may exist too. Saturn in Gemini may lean into or be frequently exposed to things like gossip, mockery, vilifying, trickery, and harmful persuasion or charm. Saturn is an outer planet that rules over a group of people rather than a personal placement. Within this group intelligence may be deeply respected or criticized. The sharing of ideas is something that makes members of this group distinct in some way. Depending on the individual's placement and aspects to Saturn they may overcome fears of communication with scattered energy, shallowness, and social competitiveness or hostility. While others may deal with their shadow through restriction, awkwardness, and detachment. Valuing one's mind, deep side, and following curiosity is important. Connection and learning are desires for this Saturn and a place they may always find themselves growing and transforming in. One important thing is to never let their voice and thoughts be hindered by outside forces.

Saturn in Cancer: A refusal to move on is a shadowy side for this placement. Saturn in Cancer is known to stay tethered to the past, making moody or heated decisions based on past hurts. They may find themselves feeling haunted or that insecurities commonly drag them into old behaviors. They may have an intense relationship to things like nurturing, protection, affection, depth, understanding, and caring - maybe a desire for it, lack of it, or unhealthy attachment to those ideals/traits. Getting in touch with one's emotions, insecurities, fears, and intuition is important for them. Attitudes towards family, parents, mothers, or the most emotionally influential parent can be questioned, restricted, or overwhelmed for this group. Embracing motherhood, parenthood, family responsibility, family karma, or lineage may be a shadow these people have to dance with. Saturn in Cancer may gain great insight throughout their life and find a lot of meaning and attachment. But they may also be overprotective, rigid, possessive, easily jealous, and possibly manipulative. They can be security-driven and find challenges similar to Taurus that revolve around safety and endurance. Compassion, adaptability, and introspection or self-mastery are virtues for this Saturn placement.

Saturn in Leo: Challenges and shame revolve around confidence, empowerment, creativity, vitality, and individuality. The ego is most likely inflated or deflated, far from a healthy balance. These individuals may be prone to being bossy or authoritative, stubborn, selfish, and heated. There may be a lot of power plays and struggles with this group's relationships and dynamics among each other. There can be unfairness, suppression, and a restriction towards pleasure, generosity, warmth, creation, pride, and bravery. These people have to be fighters in some sense in their life. There is an admiration or hatred towards power, royalty, entitlement, and divinity. The conflicts this group faces together swing from being hyper individualistic to collective. Saturn in Leo may find that they frequently become the victims of being used and exploited. In turn their shadowy side may involve this tendency to use others. Naivety, generosity, optimism and misuse of power, control, and selfishness are major themes here. Developing pride, individuality, and self-love is vital for growth or understanding the shadow.

Saturn in Virgo: This placement has an unexpected shadow that hides passion, obsession, harshness, judgment, and self-righteousness. Corruption and tarnishing have connections to Virgo and may be seen in the planet that rules over the inner shadow. Here Saturn has an unhealthy practice of self-discipline, disconnection, and devotion. They may be overly prude, frugal, practical, or emotionally restrained. There can be a lot of worry and nervous energy for these individuals. Acceptance is a crucial desire for this placement, along with finding freedom that does not threaten calmness and stability. Fear of failure, losing, or not being perfect are great insecurities for this placement. Hardworking, intelligence, and skill are all highly valued by this group or are areas that are frequently discussed and focused on. Embracing and appreciating the need for their sterner traits like efficiency, pragmatism, and dependability combined with appreciating their messier side is important. Seeing things in black and white vs. grey is a conflict this group may face among each other. Humility may also be a hot subject for these people- what level is healthy or acceptable? Is it useful, needed, or suffocating? Education, establishing common sense, teamwork, and promoting care and support are helpful to this group understanding each other and themselves better.

Saturn in Libra: The dark side of Saturn in Libra tends to involve selfishness, isolation or detachment, and judgment. Logic and objectivity are considered strengths for this placement, but its shadow can live in pettiness, jealousy, vengeful feelings, be deceitful, and have a coldness. Persuasion, art, beauty, connection, and giving may all be areas of healing and importance for this group, but opinions, gossip, betrayals, shallowness, competition, vanity, and unfairness may plague them. Romantic relationships may take the stage during this time period and among this group. The importance of romance can be exaggerated or the opposite - neglected. Questions about relationships and dynamics are asked and evaluated. The darker side of Saturn here can be argumentative, opinionated, lack reassurance, and may fall into too much hesitance and indecision. Saturn is exalted in Libra, but even with that ease and potency, Saturn here finds themselves struggling with fears of loneliness, conflict, intimacy, pressure and regret or dissatisfaction. Saturn in Libra is known for lessons revolving around self-love, independence, relating to others, fairness and unfairness, and behaving more tactfully, polite, understanding, and patient. But to find use and value from these lessons, to face the shadow involves facing their ugly side, imperfection, depth, blunt honesty, and aspects of life that may lack respect, equality, and harmony.

Saturn in Scorpio: This Saturn's "shadow" is dark and spooky, filled with secrets, spite, jealousy, possessiveness, resentment, manipulation, and self-destructive. However Saturn is about restriction and limitation and here emotional expression, passion, and intensity are likely suppressed. Saturn in Scorpio was likely taught at a young age to try to control their emotions or learn that being sensitive and vulnerable are dangerous - weak. Self-mastery is associated with the sign Scorpio and that is an important lesson for this Saturn. Self-mastery for Saturn in Scorpio is not necessarily trying to push emotions to the side, ignore them, or bury them. Self-mastery comes from introspection, healing, understanding, acceptance, and allowing emotions to flow in a healthy way. These people may come off as highly reserved, private, secretive, or maybe even cool-headed and logical, they hide their true selves and feelings fervently. Learning forgiveness and adaptability are common "lessons" for Saturn in Scorpio. In their shadow are extreme emotions but also a sense of unchanging or stagnation. This placement might not easily recognize or accept their more stubborn, hard-headed side. Getting in touch with one's intuition or even ideas around inner magic are important. Scorpio is a sign of empowerment and Saturn will put these people through all the hoops and rings of fires to obtain that power. Emotional intelligence and maturity, responsible authority or confidence, embracing passion, and healing wounds of betrayal or abandonment are areas that address this shadow.

Saturn in Sagittarius: Here Saturn faces struggles of dishonesty, controlling belief systems, a lack of confidence, selfishness, rebellion, and shallowness or scatteredness. These individuals may have felt trapped by a belief system in their life somehow. They may be the ones to question a system OR zealously fight for it. This Saturn gets carried away with impulsiveness, last minute decisions and promises, newness, and ideas. Saturn's restriction dulls and starves the Sagittarian flame that seeks truth, knowledge, openness, and depth. Ignorance may be a big shadow for these people and education/knowledge is the path out of that darkness. Learning to accept and admit ignorance is important here along with a desire for change and information. Saturn in Sagittarius has a great desire to be liked by others and to also like themselves. A possible oppression of their own self-belief can cause inner spite or confusion. Saturn in Sagittarius may put on a show for others, dazzles to impress others and then burns out the relationships or influence quickly. Saturn in Sagittarius may find challenges but also empowerment through roles of the teacher, student, showman, stranger, or philosopher. Personal truth and freedom are focuses when it comes to dealing with their inner demons.

Saturn in Capricorn: A narrow-mind, control, rigidness, coldness, and sternness are part of this shadow. Here Saturn craves validation or purpose. Saturn in Capricorn typically falls in line with their society's values and traditions. Saturn is expressed clearly in Capricorn and this is a group of people who may feel intensely controlled, trapped, restrained. Passions, affection, sensitivity, desires, warmth, and self can all be buried or chained. Maturity comes to these people with responsibility and hard work. Conformity may in itself be vital to their growth, but Saturn will cause pressure or challenges, and this may mean Saturn in Capricorn can have some of the loudest, most obvious, or most surprising revelations and rebellions. It may be that there is a need to balance and accept the nature of conformity vs. rebellion, understand the need for both. Capricorn is associated with pessimism, realism, cynicism, depression, melancholy. This placement may surprisingly address questions and issues surrounding mental health or may find that those with this sign greatly struggle with mental health. Saturn in Capricorn may struggle with greed, materialism, over work, burnout, and harmful priorities. Saturn in Capricorn's work is cut out for them. They should approach changes with caution but there is a great need to get in touch with their emotional and spiritual self. Emotional expression is key to embracing the shadow.

Saturn in Aquarius: Here Saturn becomes an eccentric, chaotic, intellectually focused teacher that promotes independence, individuality, and self-respect. But even with forward-thinking, idealistic, humanitarian Aquarius does this placement have frightening shadows. Saturn in Aquarius's shadow involves fear of rejection and loneliness yet a possible desire for separation, detachment, maybe even isolation. Saturn in Capricorn addresses conformity while Saturn in Aquarius addresses nonconformity, rebellion, and standing out. This group will value what makes each person unique, they value going against the norm. But there are struggles with hypocrisy, shallowness, impulsiveness, and general unpredictability. There is a lack of stability and extreme changes or forces for these people and their path to growth. To understand the "shadow" of Aquarius as a sign I want to quote Judy Hall - "With two powerful co-rulers (Saturn & Uranus), Aquarius can have one of two shadows. The Saturnine shadow is cold, rigid, and disapproving, a perfectionist craving control, which it may achieve through anarchy. The second, dominated by Uranus, is unconventional...doing things simply for the sake of being different. Sometimes psychotic, this shadow figure aspires to anarchy and annihilation." Here Saturn may find the most healing, strength, or acceptance through space, unusual boundaries, practicing more rest and flexibility, and addressing conflicts surrounding the individual vs. the group. Saturn in Aquarius reshapes individuality and may reshape maturity. Ideas that seemed strange are more accepted among them. Saturn in Aquarius must accept both inner and outer chaos, find inner stability through cooperation, adaptability, and knowledge.

Saturn in Pisces: Guilt, lack of boundaries, playing the victim, addiction, and fear of not belonging, loneliness, and hard truths may exist here. Pisces is known for escapism, illusions, disillusionment, fantasies, dreams, spirituality, healing, and magic. This is a group that dreams big but may struggle with practicality, logic, reality. Saturn in Pisces shadow may run from responsibilities, maybe accountability, and sometimes from the self or independence. Saturn here can be manipulative, hypersensitive, reactionary, lethargic, and flaky. Saturn in Pisces may frequently be victims to con artists, illusions, false promises, and unrealistic standards. Change during this time and with these people don't happen with cycles, exploding, breaking, or building but comes and goes with fluidity. This is a time where things are not set in stone, there are too many questions and not enough answers, things may seem opposite or confusing, and lines become blurred, or ideas melt together. Misunderstandings, general frustration, instability, and a dynamic between over-sharing vs. secrecy exist in this group's relationships and dynamic with each other. But this placement has great potential for empathy, intuition, emotional and spiritual healing, forgiveness, and generosity. This group may have to address hard questions around union, completion, what it means to be whole, to belong, to be fulfilled. They may learn the extremes of separation and coming together. Saturn in Pisces finds growth, empowerment, and can feel safe or conquering towards their shadow side with self-love, acceptance, healthy boundaries, compassion, and imagination. There is a huge push towards learning to help, care, and empathize without taking on other's pain or shame. Through love and expressing love can they overcome the part of them that doubts their ability to be warm, stable, providing, and nurturing.

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